Illinois historian’s book provides introduction to gender history
Gender history is hiding in plain sight, at work in all aspects of our society, said history professor Antoinette Burton.
“For many decades, histories were written without attention to women or gender or sexuality. Everything that mattered happened in congress or on the battlefield,” Burton said. “Gender makes a huge difference in how political movements unfold and how capitalism works, in the workplace but also in the household. There’s no aspect of public, private, civic or political life that is untouched by gender.”
Burton, who is the director of the Humanities Research Institute at Illinois, wrote a new book, “Gender History: A Very Short Introduction,” which gives an overview of gender history as a category of historical analysis since the 1970s, including how the field has changed interpretations of the histories of slavery, capitalism, migration and empire. The “Very Short Introductions” series by Oxford University Press provides concise descriptions of a wide range of topics.
Although gender history and women’s history are often combined in academic departments, they are not the same, Burton said. The field of women’s history looks at the participation or exclusion of women in various aspects of society, while gender history looks at how the difference between the sexes is produced and managed.
Gender history is relevant to exploring topics such as the wage gap between men and women, the differences in the rates of attainment of college degrees and controversies over gender-neutral restrooms, Burton said.
“We live in a moment when gender and the very idea that it exists is under fire. The idea that something connected to apparent biological sex could be socially constructed is really controversial right now,” she said. “In that sense, the availability of language for gender difference and fluidity is revolutionary.”
In her book, she disputes the notion that gender as a field of study resulted from a progression that began with feminism and civil rights. She said movements around gender and sexuality emerged at the same time, although they developed in distinctive ways.
“Gender, race and class don’t all matter in the same way at the same time,” but they all are descriptive categories used in historical analysis, and they intersect in providing historical context, Burton said. For example, “slavery and imperialism were both invested in controlling the gender binary. Slavery and empire depended on the gendered division of labor, and the labor of women was at the site of reproduction.”
Gender history also sheds light on the cultural differences in views on gender over both time and place, she said. Burton examines the histories of nonwestern cultures, many of which have strong traditions of gender fluidity, including South Asian and East Asian societies.
“The preoccupation of gender as binary is very Western, and presumptions about gender stability and its binary are very modern,” Burton said. “There’s a lot of pressure on gender to be conformist and be binary to serve the needs of modern Western society and its ambitions.”
Grammatical references to the use of “they” and “them” as gender pronouns date to the Middle Ages, she said.
“They have a deep history in the West and have come back into usage. That linguistic flexibility for gender is not something that ‘wokeness’ originated. It made me realize that one of the most important things that researchers do is remind us that it doesn’t have to be this way or that it wasn’t the way it is now back then, or maybe it was a little bit like that, or maybe it was like that in England but not Brazil. What looks ‘normal’ to some wasn’t and may not be the norm in other times and places,” she said.
At a time when gender studies programs are being scaled back in some places and people feel threatened by the topic, “this field tells us important truths about the past and sheds light on the present,” Burton said.
